When you Should use a Landing Page
Recently I have come across a lot of confusion on when you would use a landing page instead of linking to your website. It is difficult for some business owners to see why they would send traffic to a landing page that focuses on only one service instead of putting the visitor on their website that shows everything the business has to offer. Let’s take a closer look at what a landing page is and how you would use it.
What is a Landing Page?
According to Wikipedia a landing page is, “the page that appears when a potential customer clicks on an advertisement or a search-engine result link.” I’m going to change that definition to, “a landing page is any page that your potential customers enter your website on.” The way to use landing pages effectively is to set up your website and marketing campaigns to “land” your site visitors on the most relevant page.
According to Wikipedia a landing page is, “the page that appears when a potential customer clicks on an advertisement or a search-engine result link.” I’m going to change that definition to, “a landing page is any page that your potential customers enter your website on.” The way to use landing pages effectively is to set up your website and marketing campaigns to “land” your site visitors on the most relevant page.
Getting your potential customers to land on the correct page of your website through organic search takes a well organized site with an effective search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. You can’t control what page the search engines link to in the organic search listings, but you can influence them. You should make sure you are actively working on SEO or outsourcing that work to experienced professionals.
In the other areas of online marketing (email marketing, pay per click, banner ads, etc.) you control what page the potential customer lands on. The question is, should you take the visitor to your normal website or a specific landing page system? To answer that question you should ask yourself, what is the goal of the campaign? If you are running a marketing campaign focused on branding, then sending visitors to your website makes the most sense. If you are trying to generate leads for one of your services then a landing page system focused on that one service will give you the best results.
A landing page system gives you the opportunity to target a specific service or product without all of the additional “noise” that is found on most business websites. The idea is to send traffic that is interested in a service to a page that only focuses on that one service. Attention spans online are very short so the less your landing page has to distract the potential customer away from the campaign’s goal the better.
For example, if I own a carpet cleaning company trying to generate carpet cleaning leads, I would send traffic from my carpet cleaning ads to a carpet cleaning landing page system. I wouldn’t want the customer to get side tracked looking at the air duct cleaning my company also provides because they will quickly forget why they came to my site in the first place, to schedule a carpet cleaning appointment. The number one rule online is to give your site visitors what they want as quickly as possible. The best way to do that when running a targeted campaign is to send them to a landing page system.
